Invite offers iPhone users a simple way to agree on the best time to meet, but it could be a lot more automated.

It's surprising when Microsoft releases an app for iOS devices before its own Windows phones, but that's exactly the case with Invite, an iPhone app designed to ease the pain of scheduling meetings. Polling prospective participants to find an optimal meeting time is hardly a new idea, though, and longtime PCMag fave Doodle offers more options and automation. But Invite gives iPhone users (and, later, Android and Windows Phone users) a free, simple way to organize meetings.

Starting UpInvite is a reasonable 17MB download from the iTunes App Store, and runs on iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches with iOS 8.1 or later, but it is optimized for the smaller screens, meaning it appears on the iPad as an iPhone-only app, though you can install it on the tablet. A bunch of the comments in the App Store claimed there were problems getting it installed, but I was able to successfully install it on an iPhone 5, an iPad, and an iPhone 6.

Before you can start inviting, you need to sign into either an Office 365 account or you can create an account using any email address and press the button on a confirmation email. Like every app I've reviewed in the past few years, Invite wants to send you notifications, but for a meeting-setup app, that seems reasonable. It also wants access to your contacts, which also make a lot of sense considering the app's purpose.

Create Your First MeetingYou start out in the app with a cloud-background that says "No invites yet. Let's plan an event." You do this by hitting the big Plus Sign in the upper-right corner. Doing so opens a simple form in which you name the event, add people, suggest times, a place for the meeting, and any other pertinent details. You suggest times simply by tapping on timeslots in a calendar view.

Once all those ducks are in a row, you can send the invite to your desired attendees. A rocker-switch control on this page sets whether the app reserves on your own calendar all the times you suggested above. Then you hit Send, and wait for the spinning Sending icon to change to say "Sent!" Now you see any upcoming meetings you're scheduling on the app's home page, with number of outstanding responses. The tool shows times in the local user's time zone, which is great for far-flung conference calls.

I ran into a limitation of the fledgling productivty app and service at this point, getting a message saying "Sorry for the delay. We're more in demand than predicted and adding capacity to fit. We'll try to connect you in 4 minutes." That's kind of annoying for a tool that supposed to save time, but I'd expect Microsoft will quickly beef up the service.

When your invitation goes through, recipients get an email with a button link to a page where they can respond by checking checkboxes of times they're available. When people respond, you get a notification on your phone, and the meeting's page in the app shows the initials of participants next to times that work for them. When you've got a sufficiency of responses, you tap Choose final date & time at the bottom of the screen. I expected it would automatically select the time that the most people marked as OK, as Doodle does, but it just lets you choose that by eyeball. Doodle also lets invitees answer right from their calendar app, and meetings invitations in that service can be initiated on the Web as well as on mobile.

When you finalize the date and time in Invite, participants are not notified automatically, as you'd expect, but they see the finalized time if they revisit the response page. There is, however, a Send Calendar Invites option at the bottom, which makes it easy for invitees to add the appointment to any standard online calendar by simply pressing Yes or Accept, depending on which email/calendar system is being used.

I wish that the app would automatically find the time that worked for the most people, and that it would send invites as soon as you finalize the time, without requiring an extra step, though that last quibble is possibly a matter of preference—others may prefer the explicit step.

Attractive and Worthwhile, but Limited Invite has a couple other limitations: It can't schedule conference rooms or check the recipients' calendars to generate automatic responses. But the simple little app certainly can be of use in polling your colleagues for the best time for a meeting, and does take some of the pain out of the process. Its interface is very clear and simple, but do wish it were more automated like competing tool Doodle, PCMag's Editors' Choice scheduling app and service.

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About the Author

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine?s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine?s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine?s S... See Full Bio

Microsoft Invite (for iPhone)

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